Zombies as Cultural Symptom: Senaldi on Death and the Undead

Marco Senaldi's editorial for Artribune argues that contemporary society, while publicly celebrating death through media, has repressed its personal significance, reducing funerals to traffic nuisances. The cultural imaginary compensates by reintroducing death through the figure of the zombie, a 'non-dead' being that blurs the line between life and death. Senaldi draws on Kant's concept of the 'infinite judgment' (e.g., 'the soul is non-mortal') as distinct from simple negation, a distinction Slavoj Žižek applied to Stephen King's undead. This philosophical framework explains the proliferation of zombies in cinema from Romero to Rodriguez. Senaldi observes that zombies have escaped fiction into real life: Marc Quinn's 2011 'Zombie Boy' sculpture outside SFMOMA, and a current Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport road safety campaign featuring actors with birth and death dates, presented as smiling but deceased. He compares the campaign's eerie effect to Orwell's '1984,' where objects lose color. The editorial was published in Artribune Magazine #35.